[another_poster]

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.

[dimitrios1]

PSA: (National) Newspapers incite rage for clicks and revenue generation, and serve as a propagandizing arm for our beloved 3 letter agencies. Their services are essential for ensuring the success of our neoconservative war hawks in Washington to continue to fund their war machine with hundreds of billions of dollars while neglecting more pressing matters like our nation's crumbling infrastructure and completely unaffordable healthcare system. So please help society by becoming a well-informed citizen, and taking everything someone is trying to sell you as the truth with a heavy grain of salt.

[arpyzo]

I completely agree with your "grain of salt" advice. That said, to lean towards well-informed and away from rage and propaganda, I suggest subscribing to long-form periodicals, and avoiding "here's today's list of horrible things that happened in the world" style publications.

[dimitrios1]

I was careful to add "national" newspapers since those are the primary targets of those who seek to propagandize. I find immense value in a local newspaper that informs the citizens of new or upcoming policy changes, development, and other matters that are more likely to directly impact your life. Support your local papers!

[uncomputation]

And what headline are they supposed to run with long-standing, systemic issues? “US Healthcare System Still Bad”? News is about current events. Things happening, not the state of the world as a whole.

If you don’t have newspapers, who are you becoming “well-informed” from? Journalists do the work of combing over government press releases, financial data, sourcing, interviews with relevant parties, etc. If they aren’t doing this, who is? The thing is, all of the more partisan news outlets whether Fox or Jacobin, get their base facts somewhere and if it is not their own reporters doing the grunt work, they are sourcing the actual base “facts” from the reporters you don’t seem to recognize.

[dimitrios1]

Yes. Continue to run those headlines until the status quo changes. These are active situations that continue get worse, and continue to currently negatively affect the majority of US citizens. The apathy is part of the reason nothing has improved. It's like we gave up. If you don't keep trying to improve, the revolutionaries will come, and no one will be able to defend what we have against them.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

The free press is the only private organization mentioned in the US Constitution and often called the fourth branch of government because of the oversight that it provides.

[stusmall]

This doesn't really hold up in a conversation about paywalls. Clickbate generated ad revenues isn't typically from sites funded by subscriptions. Subscriptions actually help fight that.

[colpabar]

It’s not just clickbait though. If the US wants a war, chances are most mainstream news organizations will all agree. If the US wants to expand the surveillance state, most mainstream news will tell us why it’s necessary. If the US wants to deregulate, most mainstream news will tell us how that regulation was actually hurting the economy.

I’m tired of the “good news is worth paying for” argument. I don’t disagree with that idea, but I think it’s time for a lot of the mainstream news organizations that people suggest I pay for to die. They had their time, things have changed, and they are failing to adapt. Let’s try something new.

[fma]

Wait...so news orgs are bad but good enough to read if it's free?

If they truly are bad you need a site blocker, not a paywall bypasser.

Trying something new would be starting up a news org, not coding a paywall bypasser.

People should just admit that they are cheap.

[AlwaysRock]

This isn't really true. Almost every major newspaper posts op ed, letter to the editor, or opinion pieces that are often clickbait. They are okay with it because it gets views, and they can say, "Oh that was just an opinion piece, not our actual views" if it goes sideways.

[peppermint_tea]

it is fine, Biden said all of this will be fixed in the union speech. Like Trudeau in Canada, he says all the right thing, hard to disagree with him... let's see if the action will follow the words. Personally, I am disillusioned with all of this mess, NATO just pushing forward for decades, now we are in this mess and the ukranian people will be used as "chair à canon" and the russian people will be broke to an extent hard to conceive, even for the low tier of poor american people, which I am also sympathetic too. what a mess.

/rant

[pier25]

We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough.

[NikolaNovak]

Oh man; I was going to support the GP post, but then I remembered what unsubscribing from The Economist was like, and my mouth is filed with Bile & my brain is filled with pure sheer hate.

[ok123456]

They made it so difficult to unsub, I just waited until the credit card expired.

I vowed never to pay for a news subscription again. Big mistake.

[_jal]

Yeah, I refuse to resubcribe to them or the Times.

If the only way these ailing news orgs* can survive is by being manipulative jerks to people trying to stop paying them, then let them burn.

* Neither the Economist nor the Times is ailing

[wrycoder]

Question: how do you unsubscribe on Substack?

Answer: <click>

[jrockway]

You can subscribe through your phone, so then Apple is in charge of cancelation. You can link your accounts and still view things on the desktop website. (I think they also have bundles to make it non-monolithic, but that probably doesn't translate to your desktop because... that would be too convenient.)

[pier25]

I don't have an iPhone and 99% of the times I read news on desktop...

[jmckib]

Washington Post lets you cancel through their website without talking to anyone. It's also significantly cheaper than NYT last I checked. I'm a subscriber, and I think it's a pretty solid paper especially for national politics coverage.

[cromd]

I subscribed for a while, and really liked the news! However, a little off topic, there was a very strange several day period where I got repeated auto-playing audio-only ads that I could not stop from playing. There were no audio/video controls anywhere, but I could turn my phone volume down. For days, the ad was always this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYUvgxwuJbA (Dietz Nuts ad, the joke is that Dietz sounds like "deez" or "these")

I called their support asking if this is a known type of ad that they do for paying subscribers. It seemed like a bug, so thought they'd want to dig into it. They told me that this is indeed a thing they do, and that I am not exempt from autoplaying unstoppable audio ads just because I pay. I told them to double check, since otherwise I'd be canceling, and they confirmed that it's a thing, so I canceled. (I'm 50% sure the support person just didn't know what I was saying. Maybe my ad blocker was being screwy somehow.)

[mardifoufs]

In my experience, the Post is basically New York Post/Fox News tier when it comes to the outrage baiting. Sure, a lot of those articles are in the "opinion" section, but even then, the lines between the opinion/news sections are almost non-existent at this point. The comment section is also beyond toxic; it's filled with unhinged conspiracy stuff but from the blue side. At least the New York Times, as much as it's flawed, still has a much better "normal news" section and it's opinion section isn't filled with the most outrage baiting low tier tribal articles. Its international coverage is miles ahead of the wapo, too. The WP is cheaper for a reason.

[jmckib]

The op-eds are clearly labeled as such (which I'm thankful for because I have no interest in reading them with the occasional exception). There are also clearly labeled "Analysis" and "Perspective" articles that can sometimes blur the lines between news and opinion, though the Analysis articles are some of my favorite because I find they are trustworthy, and I don't have time to analyze and interpret everything happening in the news myself.

Outside of that, I find the coverage to be pretty neutral or maybe center-left, but definitely factual and not outrage baiting. WSJ is even more neutral, but I find that WaPo has better politics coverage (while WSJ has better business coverage). NYT is similar to WaPo, but IMO a little less neutral with the way its headlines are written. NYT is still a great paper though.

[gxqoz]

I subscribed at one of their cheap rates last year and didn't find much in it unique from other sources I'm already subscribed to.

[jmckib]

What other sources are you already subscribed to? I'm always looking for recommendations.

[gxqoz]

Lots of stuff. For "pure news" New York Times, Seattle Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian. Lots of somewhat more general interest subscriptions also have news angles like Slate Plus, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Harpers, Literary Review, ProPublica, New York Magazine, some Substacks. I realize this is a lot (and is only a partial list) but pretty much all of these listed ones have various interesting pieces I wasn't finding anywhere else. Whereas WP felt very "cable news" to me, just giving article after article on the latest stuff happening at the White House. I can get that elsewhere and am already not interested in most cases.

[wrycoder]

How about a group subscription on Substack, distributed to the authors based on the log of the number of page views?

[pier25]

So like a Netflix of news?

[yupper32]

I pay for NYT, but I can't subscribe to the paper of every article I want to read. I need some kind of group subscription for it to be feasible.

[munk-a]

I would pay for NYT but their unsubscription process has traditionally been notoriously and unnecessarily difficult. I have a personal moral objection to giving money to any company that makes it more difficult to stop giving them money than to start.

Yes, there have also been major factual blunders, but for the vast majority of information they seem to genuinely try and deliver vetted facts.

[endisneigh]

Well wouldn’t the answer be to rely solely on NYT for your news?

Ironically the real solution to this is more ads, but people will block that too lol

[zdw]

Ah, the NYT that helped justify the US invasion of Iraq based on falsehoods? That NYT?

Edit: Explanation - the "I subscribe to the NYT" as a pat response to funding news sources puts far too much power in the NYT's hands, and they've proven to be less than trustworthy in the past.

[______-_-______]

I can't say if the NYT are villains or not, but if they are, you might have better luck convincing people if your only data point wasn't from literally decades ago

[munk-a]

In defense of that point - it is probably fair to blame that missreporting for thousands of deaths - not all the deaths of the Iraq War, but a big chunk of them. Don't forget that contemporarily you had an immense amount of well founded skepticism about the true cause of the war which turned out to be quite accurate in retrospect but was decried as unpatriotic at the time. The Iraq War is the first time I personally experience news comedy being a more reliable source than traditional media.

In defense of the NYT, vetting sources is hard and they publish a whole lot of good content.

[mardifoufs]

Too bad the consequences of that "data point" are still so profound that people are still dying daily in that region directly because of that war. When do you think we can just forget about the kind of war mongering the NYT pushed ?

Has the NYT changed anything concretely since then? Because going by the way they still seem completely addicted to "anonymous sources in the intelligence community" it sure doesn't seem like they have learnt their lesson.

[willcipriano]

To be fair the war lasted up until a couple of months ago.

[mint2]

Afghanistan and Iraq are different btw.

[willcipriano]

The war on terror encompasses both Iraq and Afghanistan.

[mardifoufs]

The NYT helped push both wars.

[yupper32]

I mean, good luck finding an established news source that hasn't made mistakes in the past.

The vast majority of the reporting from NYT is good, and I don't rely on them exclusively. They're just the only written news source I pay for.

[ok123456]

Any kind of mainstream press will tow the line of national bias in order to keep their access to official channels and in turn their legitimacy.

[rplnt]

I don't want to pay a subscription, I want to pay for content I actually consume. I hate that paywalls incentivize to write clickbait even more than ads do. I hate opinion pieces pretending to be something else. I hate paying for copy-pasted texts from news agencies or press releases. But as with TV, you have to pay in bulk and if the good content is sold separately it's extremely expensive.

[coolso]

The NYT is my main source of news, but I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting it - much as I'd strongly discourage everyone from actually financially supporting Fox or CNN.

The truth is the NYT is a heavily biased, establishment bootlicking far-left progressivism propogating propaganda machine. They will do whatever it takes to present the opposing view as racist, supremacist, sexist, anti-semetic, anti-gay, and bigoted, while anything far worse but on "their side" is handled with kid gloves. Trump sneezed? Well that's racist, plus he wants you to drink bleach, literally, so we're going to cover that heavily for the next week. Something bad happened? It's Actually Trump's Fault. Here's Why. Trump was totally going to destroy America, except, well, that didn't actually happen, at all, but they're still trying to push that narrative.

Biden bungled Afghanistan, gas prices and inflation is through the roof, Putin invaded Ukraine under his watch, Biden very prematurely declared "independence from the virus" a year ago (!!!), Biden flip flops almost as much as Trump, has more deaths under his belt from COVID than Trump... everything is swept under the rug, a passing mention in all but the most egregious examples, and even then they treat him gently. I recently read an opinion column from a long-standing columnist there basically telling us how we should all support Biden because he just, like, has a really tough job, you know, and would you even wish such an important and consequential job on your worst enemy?

The NYT needs help for sure, but not financially, unfortunately.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Print media subscriptions are some of the best money I've spent. No bullshit, few unobtrusive ads, no tracking, no distractions. Supporting free press.

[z3c0]

Fair enough, but I often wonder if this new arrangement in the availability of quality information will cause any problems for the lower class. A lot of political rhetoric does gear itself towards the poor, after all.

[another_poster]

Agreed, I think it’s currently causing problems in the US.

In theory public media like PBS and NPR should address the gap, but those organizations tend to depend on donations from the wealthy, so their coverage skews towards their interests and conversational style.

I think the government should provide newspaper subscription vouchers to the poor.

[DeWilde]

True, but if a newspaper is open for bots to help promote it through SEO, I won't have many qualms about bypassing the flimsy paywall.